How I realized that I wanted to get into Tech.
As a kid I was always into the more nerdy/geeky side of things. Growing up with a young father, I was right next to him playing Mortal Kombat, watching vintage anime with him (dragon ball to be precise) and reading his old comic books. I also have always been more on the artistic side. I love to draw.
But I was always more of the lazy kid, so during high school when it came to applying to college and choosing my major, I left it up to my parents and followed in the footsteps of my father by deciding to major in Business admin.
There was a time when I thought about switching over to Computer Science my freshmen year, but I succumbed to the mindset that Computer Science was for the supper nerd and math whizzes, and I didn’t want to make college any more difficult than I had to. Too much partying and abusing liquor for that.
FAST FORWARD TO CAREER LIFE
My first job comes and eventually I notice that my strength lies in more of the technical side. In This job, I naturally gravitate towards excel. Being a financial analyst excel is our bread and butter, but with me I dove deeper into excel than my coleaques.it started at first by learning the more complex functions, the IF Statements, v-lookups and nested functions. That then turned into learning VBA to further automate my work flow, so I could focus more on the analysis instead of the manipulation of the data. This was my first taste of the power of programming.
As I gained more proficiency with VBA, I started to become a sort of guru in the office. I was the go-to guy for all things technical, especially excel. This is what differentiated me from my peers, and what ultimately led to my many promotions. All the way up to Senior Analyst. By most people’s standards I was living a great life: young, owned a condo, nice car making good money, but something was still tugging at me. Don’t get me wrong, I liked being a financial analyst, I love the problem solving involved with it, but the longer I thought about it, I had to be honest with myself, and at least dive into programming more to see if my curiosity had any validity.
Lucky for me, I had friends who also had come to a similar career crossroads and were also interested in possibly entering software engineering. We had discussed together, all the different ways to go about getting into code. From school, (which was a no-no for me. I’m allergic to any more debt), to the self-taught route which was more my cup of tea. I surfed the web and YouTube and eventually decided to try my hand at this code thing with the help of Team Treehouse. Treehouse had stuck out to because of the different pricing structures. $25 dollars a month for access to all the course was great deal in my opinion and the site aesthetically just looked better than its competitors.
The first course I took was the HTML and CSS courses. These courses were perfect for not only me, but any beginner, as these languages are very beginner friendly. I started dedicating hours after work and even on weekends to learning everything I could about HTML and CSS. I built very basic and ugly sites. (hey, you must start somewhere). But even though the sites were basic and nothing that I would publish to the web. They were my babies, my first-borns, you might say. And they were special because I created them. I instantly drew parallels to this from my professional life in finance building labor models. I had always like building things using software. So, this was right up my alley. I made a promise to myself that would learn web development by the end of the year.
LIFE HAPPENS
Eventually I started to become miserable at my job and determined that I had to get up out of there, so applying for jobs become my number one priority. Then I totaled my car, and it just happened to be summer, so everyone was hitting my phone for plans to go out, drink, and just be young and reckless. I also determined that I had been in my condo for too long for it to be so empty and decided real furniture and décor was needed. I lost all my focus and fell off for the rest of the year.
THE COMEBACK
What got me back into coding was a visit from my old college buddy, who was a first-class example of how dedication to programming can pay off. He had given himself 3 months and found a job as a front-end developer. After talking to him. I decided that I wasn’t going to make any more excuses and that this year would be the year I became a developer. I re-activated my account on Treehouse and enrolled in the Full-stack JavaScript tech degree program. And have been consistently putting in my hours and I can say I’m already see the payback.
